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Updated: June 15, 2025
De Vries thought this a good opportunity to establish a permanent peace with the savages; but Kieft, who still seemed to thirst for blood, made it an occasion for treachery and death.
The most illiterate Indian could feel the force of such logic. Some European vagabonds, as it was afterwards clearly proved, stole some swine from Staten Island. The blame was thrown upon the innocent Raritan Indians, who lived twenty miles inland. The rash Director Kieft resolved to punish them with severity which should be a warning to all the Indians.
It was on the moral effect of this formidable instrument that Wilhelmus Kieft calculated; pledging his valor as a governor that, once fulminated against the Yankees, it would in less than two months drive every mother's son of them across the borders.
In doing this, he probably felt the joys of an approving conscience, a conscience all uninstructed in religious truth and thanked the great spirit that he had at length been enabled to discharge his duty in avenging his uncle's death. Kieft sent to the chief of the tribe, demanding the murderer.
The one-man power, which Kieft had exercised, was very considerably modified. Two prominent officers, the Vice-Director and the Fiscal, were associated with him in the administration of all civil and military affairs. They were enjoined to take especial care that the English should not further encroach upon the Company's territory.
Now this was a reply on which neither Jan Jansen Alpendam nor Wilhelmus Kieft had made any calculation. Finding himself, therefore, totally unprepared to answer so terrible a rebuff with suitable hostility, the admiral concluded his wisest course would be to return home and report progress.
But, however they might differ among themselves, all parties agreed in abusing the governor, seeing that he was not a governor of their choice, but appointed by others to rule over them. Unhappy William Kieft! exclaims the sage writer of the Stuyvesant manuscript, doomed to contend with enemies too knowing to be entrapped, and to reign over a people too wise to be governed.
Wilhelmus Kieft, who in 1634 ascended the gubernatorial chair, to borrow a favorite though clumsy appellation of modern phraseologists, was of a lofty descent, his father being inspector of windmills in the ancient town of Saardam; and our hero, we are told, when a boy, made very curious investigations into the nature and operation of these machines, which was one reason why he afterwards came to be so ingenious a governor.
The Indians hated Kieft, and this act of his made their hatred more bitter. A war-cloud was gathering. The Indians were well prepared for war, for they had been supplied with guns, with bullets, and with powder by those greedy Dutchmen, the smugglers, who thought more of their personal gains than of the safety of the colonists.
When Jogues had remained for six weeks in this hiding-place, his Dutch friends succeeded in satisfying his Indian masters by the payment of a large ransom. A vessel from Manhattan, now New York, soon after brought up an order from the Director-General, Kieft, that he should be sent to him. Accordingly, he was placed in a small vessel, which carried him down the Hudson.
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